Welcome to the Forum Spam

[dozer]

There have been some periodic 'welcome to the forum' messages hitting the forum lately. This is the entire text of the message. I have manually deleted all of the spam entries as well as banned the user id. These messages are not created by a human, rather they are the result of a 'BOT' automatically generating a user registration and then posting the messages. What it means is that they have penetrated the forum defenses which until recently had not been able to be penetrated by bots. As of today I have introduced some new further security measures which should eliminate the bots, please let me know by feedback if you see any suspicious messages such as these. Another weird thing is normally in the past spam messages where always trying to sell something or otherwise had an obvious motivation..... these are the first I've seen with no obvious rationale.

[jazzman]

The rational with these is that they have created a membership that will lie dormant for a while, until a bot comes along later to post the real spam when you are least expecting it.

[developer3d]

This is actually Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) Spam

The value to the spammer is in the initial postings and does not require revisit, they are not trying to sell anything but leverage your forum for some SEO authority.

As I am sure you know the number and quality of backlinks from other sites significantly influences the authority of the spammers own site in the eyes of Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.

Your forum allows do follow links in the footer signature of all posts irrelevant of the human value of the post, hence the one liners like "welcome", "good post "or the famous "I agree" contribution

[dozer]

Your forum allows do follow links in the footer signature of all posts irrelevant of the human value of the post, hence the one liners like "welcome", "good post "or the famous "I agree" contribution

That it what I would suspect but in these cases there was no signature.

[developer3d]

Haha $10 says they are from an Indian IP address